Dance Feast

Rarely do audiences experience a dance performance more than once, however Christy Funsch gives dance-goers a second chance with the ephemeral, time-based, and fleeting art form in her upcoming retrospective Funsch Solos: One On One, at Z Space, March 8-11, 2012. As a grantee of Dancers’ Group’s New Stages for Dance program, One On One features five premieres and 13 repertory solos offered in two iterations: during the first act through one-on-one viewings in curtained rooms, and then again in the second act with the audience as a group seated in the round, allowing each audience member to see the dances twice.

“I wonder what it’s like to see a solo on your own and then fifteen minutes later you see that same piece but you’re sitting in this large group. Then what do you see? What’s evocative for you? What do you remember from that one experience and how is that reinforced or threatened by the presence of the large group? I’m curious about that.” Funsch muses. She hopes the experience will stimulate discussion and conversation. Groups rotating around the perimeter of Z Space for the one on one, and then the solos repeated in the more conventional setting provide comparative experiences from both the performer and audience’s point of view.

The One On One Experience
For One on One, Funsch will perform several of her selected solos, from as far back as the 90s. She’s also gathered a fresh crop of Bay Area performers to perform repertory works as well as several new solos. “The one on one experience is an experiment, and it has been as much a performer gift as it is a way of shaking up the viewer/doer exchange so I’m curious what its going to be like from the performing side of it. There will be a lot of repetition and intimacy and shedding this moment that is shared with one other person that no one else will know about, so I think it will be really rich and different.” explained Funsch. She adds,  “I expect that there’s something about watching when you’re by yourself that may bring you into a slower state of observation, maybe a place of empathy, wherein a group setting, the exchange is really different. (During November in New York, Funsch was working with dance artist Julie Mayo on The Wrecking Project, an undertaking in which artists get to edit and re-imagine each other’s work and then perform the original and “wrecked” versions side by side.)

Going Solo
Funsch has created more than 30 solos during the past 30 years. She comments, “I think we’re all in it on our own and we have to make sense of the world and arrive as an individual with a decision, so that’s why the solo point of views come strongly to me.” Her preference as a viewer also tends toward solo work more than group performance. “I like design and appreciate those who do that kind of work really well, but I also feel like it can lead to what Tere O’Connor calls the ‘pencils in an earthquake’ kind of work where it’s a lot of pyrotechnics and flash which doesn’t necessarily ground you in an experience.”

With much work to choose from, Funsch selected repertory she could physically remember performing or rehearsing, or work about which she could recall vivid memories and thoughts from the making of the piece. “The important things are the same. The way that the embodiment of how movement is striking me and coming forth is the same.” said Funsch. “The movement is the hook. The visceral experience is the hook for me more than a concept or political statement. It’s the experience in the soft tissue, how that inspires the whole structure of the piece, the mood of the piece, the costuming all that stuff comes from a visceral place still as it did long time ago.”

On Our Own Together
Observation fuels Funsch’s creative process. She is keen to the dynamics and interactions of those she watches outside the studio in places like cafes, the street and Muni. “I do observe best when I’m on my own and that true observation takes some time, so that time to yourself, to know your point of view and be able to articulate your world view, and make answers of things, the way you decide how you’re going to treat other people all those things. Yes, you’re influenced by your family, your upbringing, friends and context, but it’s that time by yourself that really is going to let you figure your own individual choices around those issues.” she maintains.

In addition to observation, Funsch enjoys regular exchanges with colleagues in both the performing and visual arts to develop different ways of seeing space and shape. “As much as I feel that my movement history is my own, and my outlook and answers to big questions are my own, I know I am the puree of all the teachers and family and friends and strangers that have marked me.” said Funsch, adding, “As much as we act, we are also reacting. I think this is what is often for me the unexpected effect of solo work, the seeing of many others in one person’s experience, or the way one experience can amplify and refer to countless other people and other ways of seeing. Time alone in the studio, as well as improvisation, are also the staples of her work’s development. The biggest thing is the daily execution of it, the doing of it, the thinking and conceptualizing is important but for me it’s such an immediately physical practice so it’s that time spent.” said Funsch.

Finally transferring the solos onto the artists with whom she is working allows Funsch a satisfying distance from her work, which communicates to her the movements’ strengths and where to push. She notes how the process has helped her to read and parse out her personality from what’s actually in the piece of work she created. “I’ve gotten into this place where I’m less about my own physical preferences and improvisational determination of pieces and more about colleagues and wanting to celebrate them and bring out things I cherish about them in their dancing with works I’ve made for them. I think it happens naturally with people you’ve known for so long, the exchange and translation becomes easy because you have a shared movement history together.”

Having lived in the Bay Area for sixteen years, Funsch is awed by the depth and brilliance of dance activity in the region. “There are so many people pursuing paths of creativity that a lot of times intersect with politics and activism that’s so vital to keep putting out there in a way that is time-based where we attend the performance and share that durational experience together. Where it’s not a prerecorded bravado hit on YouTube. All that stuff is great but I’m for being there in the moment.”

Originally published in the January/February 2012 issue of In Dance.

Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola. Photo by Ian Douglas

Characterizing Queen Cleopatra, Jack Ferver’s maniacal grin charges the Abrons Arts Center Experimental Theater during Monday’s American Realness performance of Me, Michelle with the charming Michelle Mola. In a silvery floor-length dress, Mola repeatedly lifts her hands behind Ferver’s head, spreading her fingers to suggest a crown. As a servant, she scrambles to appease Ferver who barks demands: “I’m bored. Tell me a story. I’m lonely. Bring me the thing.” Like children, they play ball and hold a small dog, exhibiting an innocent kinship when not conversing about poison, death and murder.

Simultaneously endearing and dark, their performance maintains a stream of dialogue pouring effortlessly in tandem with the physical action. Mola’s wispy voice continues as she circles Ferver. She swoops with her head close to the floor and one leg raised. Ferver struts in white tights, oscillating between the grandiose Cleopatra character and himself. Ferver and Mola share a bright chemistry and their characters reveal shades of the past and the modern. When Ferver finally announces that he will take the poison, the dialog and upright sequences dissolve into a dance frenzy of floorwork and arabesques, augmented by John Fireman’s music. The ending is surprisingly straightforward: he dies and she cries, concluding a distinct act of the festival.

Another duet the same evening, Tool Is Loot by Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey with music by Johnathan Bepler at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, leaves more to the imagination. Lacey treats a chair as she might a person, enacting a one-sided flirtation directed at the piece of furniture. She eventually grinds her pelvis against it. Later, recorded text describes an object with physical and emotional traits usually reserved for humans, suggesting a sort of inversion. After disappearing behind a screen, Lacey emerges in a sailor dress with Cardona, the two skittering, jogging and lacing arms. Parallel to the opening text which reads “The whistle travels to the part of the room unseen,” Cardona and Lacey now exit behind the screen where one can imagine their dance continuing. All the audience sees for the duration is the dance of light – a moon-like projection that mysteriously shifts to more solid colors with the heavy brass music.

Also on Monday at American Realness, Jeremy Wade performed Fountain at the Playhouse. With the curtain closed the audience joins him onstage for a participatory group ritual, during which Wade guides the group to circulate, make “sprinkle fingers”, growl, and sustain vowel sounds while shaking. (A similar group sequence was guided late night on Saturday during Wade’s appearance at Public Assembly as part of American Pussy Faggot! Realness. He endured through interruptions by an impatient Penny Arcade and the bar crowd proved more willing to perform and lie on the floor – this one beer-soaked.)  Everyone is onstage. Everyone is a performer, and at the end of the invigorating group section, the audience surrounds Wade in a circle.

During his solo, Wade, in denim shorts and a plaid shirt, struggles to suck in a breath slowly, standing concave. He expells the air, deflating with effort. Again and again he takes these long arduous breaths progressing to an animalistic state. Wade offers intense eye contact as he travels with tensile writhing movement. The group participation before witnessing Wade’s solo adjusts the energy of the shared space to become welcoming and expansive. Left more embodied and physically connected to the performer, the viewer’s perception of Wades solo intensifies as a result of the communal effort.

American Realness at the Abrons Arts Center continues through January 15. Tickets $15.

Originally published January 11, 2012 on Culturebot.

Heather Lang and Eleanor Bauer. Photo by Ian Douglas

A whole lot of real exists in The Heather Lang Show By Eleanor Bauer And Vice Versa Trash Is Fierce Episode 2: Destiny’s Realness, and that’s a good thing. Smart, vital and spontaneous, Eleanor Bauer and Heather Lang host an insightful infomercial unpacking “realness”, which the audience experiences both live and on a television screen. The dynamic characters work in the business of connecting people to one’s “spirit product” in a direct and endearing style.

Wearing recycled materials (Lang, in a stiff dress of magazine pages and Bauer, wrapped in flowing layers of plastic bags), the two pontificate on the couch and riff about inner-light, the evils of capitalism and repurposing trash to make somethingness out of nothingness. After showcasing each product in the style of a roadshow, audience members call the 800 number for the spirit product, which is then lovingly presented to the caller by Lang or Bauer.

While the talk show format makes watching the full performance on screen possible, Trash Is Fierce should be seen in a room full of people, it’s live-ness crucial. Bauer cracks her character just once on Thursday, slumping into the couch. She cups her mouth laughing, the moment fresh for a show about realness and unifying in its honesty. In the end, Bauer and Lang remind their viewers to be awake in the world by literally holding up a compact mirror. They also remind everyone that “Trash Is Fierce!” which the audience repeats with gusto. If we are lucky they’ll bring us another episode.

Michael Hart’s photography exhibition, Unreal, with text by Ryan Tracy packs years of life and art moments into a mosaic of roughly 200 images. During the opening Thursday in the Abrons Arts Center, several of Hart’s subjects present at the show informally identified their images pointing and telling anecdotes. The subjects recalled Hart’s captured moment, at times clarifying whether the shot was real or staged. Those live conversations illuminated Tracy’s text, “In the end, the body is what we have and what we use to make “the world” and with which we remember it. Real or staged. Live or performed.” The subjects made clear that those moments were both – lived and performed.

Eight short pieces compose Daniel Linehan’s Zombie Aporia performed by Linehan, Thibault Lac and Salka Ardal Rosengren in the Abrons Arts Center Experimental Theater Friday. During the first section, the performers rhythmically repeat the phrase “The music is the background for the dance” although for Linehan, the music is truly created by the dance.  The trio generates a soundtrack of music with the body through sustained monotone vocalizations, repeated words and percussive footsteps resulting from the given movement. For one song, Lac applies pressure with his hands to Rosengren’s throat and stomach to manipulate the force of her throaty tune. The execution provides a physical image of that which is heard. The exacting, often mechanical sequences cast a distance between the audience and the performers. This distance extends even in the moments during which the three get physically close to the audience, stiffly moving through the crowd to create formations dictated by a computer screen.

(M)imosa/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M) on Friday in the Abrons Arts Center Underground Theater employ a raw and layered approach to reveal the possible identities of (M)imosa. Story upon story, song upon song Cecilia Bengolea, Francois Chaignaud, Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Trajal Harrell unravel the identity of (M)imosa. The spectacle swinging from glow-in-the-dark club moments, to Stravinsky, to a crowd-pleasing rendition of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights successfully disorients and then settles as Harrell discusses authenticity through a story about the situations in which one should bring the real fancy handbag out, versus the times when the fake is the better choice. Echoing the sentiment he also suggests that in terms of realness, there is a time to be vulnerable and a time to keep one’s real to oneself.

American Realness continues through January 15 at the Abrons Arts Center. Tickets $15.

Originally published January 9, 2012 on Culturebot.

World of Wires, From L to R: Laine Rettmer, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jon Morris, Sarita Choudhury, Jay Scheib, Mikeah Ernest Jennings. Photo Courtesy of Jay Scheib

Capping the trilogy Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems, World of Wires is Jay Scheib‘s adaptation of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht, opening Friday at The Kitchen. Catching Scheib on the phone during his final week of rehearsals, he talked with me about science fiction, simulations and the new work.

World of Wires is your third production in the trilogy Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems created in residence at MIT. What’s it like making work there and what has the environment offered to your process?

Six or seven years ago I asked a group of students what they expected to be doing in 10 years and one student said she’d probably be the first woman on Mars. That was the first I knew there was a really serious Mars program out there in the world. Then a month later I had a conversation with Joe Gavin, the guy who directed the moon lander. He was the lunar lander brain. He said he wouldn’t go to Mars unless it’s a one-way trip. He didn’t want to be involved in a mission to Mars to go there and bring back rocks. The only mission he’d do is to first build a habitat, and then six months later send people, and then after that send supplies and more people and actually have a station on Martian surface. This is the famous one-way mission model, which was essentially adopted and there’s an entire community of people who are engaged in that.

So that’s the seed that started the human simulation trilogy. I learned about the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert where scientists and researchers go and wear spacesuits and live in full simulation for months at a time. So I began putting together the pieces, combining that with some of my other interests. Although I’ve been doing other productions in between – operas and plays, the ballet in Hong Kong – this trilogy it has remained a real focus of my life.

For this part of the trilogy you focus mostly on the disciplines of computer science and artificial intelligence. Can you describe how those areas helped you generate material and the interface with professionals or research in these fields?

For this production, someone approached me after a performance of Untitled Mars and said “Oh my god, do you know the work of Nick Bostrom?” So I found this guy who is the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University. He wrote a paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? In the white paper he speculates that there’s a pretty high probability that we are in fact living in a computer simulation. It turns out that the idea has a healthy following. The article is brilliant and synthesizes a number of interests that I’ve had over the years growing up, reading about simulation and finding myself drawn into the world of MIT and artificial intelligence, so its been an interesting ride. A lot of artificial intelligence is actually like Amazon.com can tell you what you want based on your preferences. We have these computers gathering information and drawing conclusions about our lives, which can be pretty nice in a way, but is also very dangerous.

There’s also my love of science fiction, which in the United States, is one area where, in my mind, really interesting thinking about the world and the way in which its changing is reflected. I don’t draw a line between science fiction and literature. I find that many of our science fiction authors are the greatest we’ve produced. The ideas are interesting. I worked with Philip K. Dick first and then spent a couple of years building a piece based on Samuel R. Delany novel Dhalgren and getting to know Chip Delany was really the highlight of the decade. Now we’re working with a novel by Daniel F. Galouye called Simulacron-3, although the piece is really based on Fassbinder’s adaptation of Galouye’s Simulacron-3. Galouye wrote this novel that’s about people who discover that they’re living in a computer simulation and it’s one of the first novels that contains the trope of plugging yourself into a network. I found that interesting pre-Matrix.

So in The Matrix, would you take the red pill or the blue pill?

We make a joke about that! In the play, this character in the Garden of Eden pours a whole handful of pills into his hand and everyone gives him advice: “Only take the blue one…Only take the red one.” I agree with Mikéah Jennings who decided in the performance to just eat all of them. That’s what happens. It would just double the affect.

I understand that a robbery you witnessed at Duane Reade influenced this work. Can you talk about what happened and what it got you thinking?

So Galouye writes in Simulacron-3 that simulations have this uncanny ability to migrate into the real, and sometimes the simulation becomes real before you expect it to, so if you want to test the theory, try simulating a bank robbery. Enter a bank with a fake pistol and stage a robbery and very quickly a customer will die of a real heart attack, the bank teller will hand you with shaking hands real money and the police officer will likely shoot you with real bullets. This is kind of a bland example, but of course if you told the cop that you’d be robbing the bank with a fake gun, you wouldn’t really learn a lot about bank robberies. It wouldn’t be a worthwhile simulation. So this is one of those ideas that stuck with me and there was something about it that didn’t make sense to me.

Then a couple of years later I was in a Duane Reade drug store on 111th and Broadway and I found myself in the middle of a really violent robbery. I had a gun held to my head for what seemed like an hour and was probably only about 40 minutes. People got beat up and hurt really badly and there was a moment where he pointed the gun at someone else and I saw it and I swear it was fake. I didn’t test the theory at the time but it stuck with me forever where I thought that’s definitely a fake pistol and if he pulled the trigger, maybe a little fire would have come out the end like a lighter or something. So that was a really scary horrifying event. There is nothing funny about what happened in that room, but the pistol – I still carry that with me that the pistol was fake. Was it all real?

In terms of working with your performers, can you give an example of what you might ask to do in rehearsals to work with this material?

We spent three weeks on Governors Island thanks to a residency from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. We took the ferry and hung out on an island. We watched a lot of  Fassbinder films. We read the entire novel out loud. We read the screenplay based on the TV series. We improvised for two and a half weeks and came up with a list of tasks: maybe that’s 10 entrances and exits, someone has to accidentally get hurt, and we improvise with these small event structures. Then we showed a work in progress assembled again in November. This is where things got interesting. We decided that in order to start the project we’d make a different work by Fassbinder first. We did a little work on a play of his called The Garbage, the City and Death and then switched to another early film called Katzelmacher. We actually shot our own version of Katzelmacher, in which we improvised text and new situations in a week and a half. Basically, we made a knockoff Fassbinder film and that’s how we started our preparation and re-entered this work. We had a studio in Tribeca for a month in an old office building, then had another residency with the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, a month on Governers Island and one at MIT.

What else are you thinking about during these final rehearsals before the opening?

The thing I’m thinking about a lot right now since I am making final decisions, is that I am onstage during the whole play, which means that there are almost two plays. The play staged for the audience and the play that I see. I’m operating the camera the whole time. What comes from the Katzelmacher experiment is that essentially the making of the production is also the making of a 90-minute single take film. So there are a number of dimensions to the work, which is an interesting prospect. It’s not staged in a traditional sense because I never leave the stage. It’s a live film, but at the same time, because we’re working on material that questions live-ness, we are trying everything we can to continue questioning live-ness from beginning to end and there are a lot of things that go into that. I don’t think I should say anything else about it!

World of Wires runs January 6-21 at The Kitchen. Tickets $20.

Jon Morris and Mikeah Ernest Jennings in Jay Scheib’s World of Wires from Jay Scheib on Vimeo.

Originally published January 5, 2012 on Culturebot.

Laura Arrington Photo by Hilary Jacobs

While they’ve never collaborated to make a work together, Laura Arrington and Jesse Hewit shared the stage as resident artists at CounterPULSE, currently work with Keith Hennessey, hold hands when they tell a shared story and spend a lot of time talking to each other on the phone. During the busy weeks prior to The Dog Show, a shared evening at Z Space composed of Arrington’s Wag and Hewit’s Freedom December 8-11, supported by Dancers’ Group’s New Stages for Dance, the duo talks about working and living parallel.

What’s it like to be working together for this evening at Z Space?

Laura Arrington: The cool thing is that Jesse and I under any other circumstance would be directly in competition with each other. We’re in the same place, we have a similar aesthetic, we’re interested in the same ideas and approaches to making work; so when we first met each other we decided it will be more interesting for both of us if we act as friends and colleagues and also mentors and dramaturges, and help each other as opposed to doing the set-up-your-own-company-camp sort of thing. It’s interesting to see our work rub up against each other. When we were resident artists at CounterPULSE we saw everything the other was working on, but this time, I’ve seen almost nothing he’s working on and he’s seen almost nothing I’m working on. Even so, many people at our most recent showing said there’s so much commonality. We’ve never collaborated with each other.

Jesse Hewit: We’re emerging and we can combine our audiences. We have a safety thing to rely on the other. We know with our powers combined it’s more interesting. Every person’s work is a discourse, and our work in the last few years has been dancing around the same discourse. That has been awesome for contextualizing not only the work itself, but the moment around the work, the community around the work and where the work fits here together…working with a peer is great, like growing up with someone.

Can you talk about the ideas and approaches you share?

LA: We don’t work or make things together, but one of the things that is true about Jesse and myself, and a lot of our peer group, is that we actually do work together because the modes of production are really important regarding how things get made: meetings and workshops and time spent together and alternative ways of getting people to make work. So not always being in the mode of “lets make a show and have rehearsal.”

JH: We derive our work not from going to class. None of us go to class and haven’t for a long time. We derive material more from anthropological methods, from street methods, activist methods, social methods. We’re interested in physical states, extreme situations, mastery in movement, conversation and parties—all these things. We derive material from that expression of being together versus learning technique and moving. When we get the chance, we definitely do like to learn from people who are smarter, but a lot of the material is derived from the experiential within a community context, economy, social group and age.

Who are some of the people guiding your art practice right now?

JH: We were in Vienna, Berlin and Scholtenhagen this summer. We’re working on a piece with Keith Hennessey’s Circo Zero Performance.

LA: Keith is my mentor not just because I love his work and ideas, but because he also has a really big focus on social functions and straight up politics. He is also one of those people who is always doing shit. There are so many artists that have these little satellites of themselves, like these weird institutions, and Keith is someone always reaching out and down and doing.

JH: He’s also always destabilizing himself. We’re both about 30 and the older you get in this kind of craft that we do there’s no such thing as financial viability and success. It’s not real and at this point we’ve met all these people at the top of their game and it really shifts your priorities about how you want to create your life as an artist. Keith’s been really great for me because he is essentially quite brave, always destabilizing his beliefs and reality, whereas most folks at his stage are ready to settle down to make meaning and conquer, and he doesn’t do that. In a sense art practice is life practice, so he’s great to be around, to have someone who redefines my instincts about my art practice by watching his life practice; constant curiosity, constantly asking questions, always wanting to learn new forms and finding ways to be wrong. Looking for ways to be wrong and looking for catastrophe is a way to re-inject the necessary tremble if you’re actually going to make things that are interesting.

LA: He is sticking to the edges and walking the unstable ground in front of him. I think if you’re going to do this, his way is the most interesting in terms of getting there. He’s always pushing himself to experience. Dance can be such drudgery and stupid b.s. of grants, and we do it over and over, and it so boring and doesn’t make you a better artist. Much of the way it’s been constructed for art makers is inhibiting because we spend all our time talking about ourselves in the third person, creating solid identity-based rhetoric so there’s a static reality to it that totally gets in the way; the scripted gets in the way of change.

Can you give us a preview of your current work that will be performed at Z Space?

LA: I’m pushing my ways of production and approaches. I’m working with systems and difficulty, duty and obedience, and so I’ve been really playing with how. At The Sandbox Series (ODC’s program promoting artistic exploration by providing choreographers with exploratory studio sessions not specifically tied to performance) it was tons of that—looking at how you communicate with the people in the room with you, how you give instructions, how they get received, if there are rules and scores going on, what is your relationship to those rules, what does it mean; so I’ve been looking at how my creative structures and rules get directed and how that shows up on different bodies…

For Wag we are looking at how the material, in terms of structure and systems, works on the immaterial, so exhausting the body, exhausting the emotional body, exhausting the relationship, so thematic ways material structures work on the emotional body or more metaphysical things. Obedience is duty and that’s my piece. I start every rehearsal with Jess, Micah and Rachel running as fast as we can for 20-30 minutes and then jumping until we can’t jump any more.

They get really hard physical scores where they have a system and are only allowed to do certain types of movement. They have to be counting and keeping track and it’s all within a text rhythm, which they’re not allowed to say out loud but they have to keep saying in their heads. They have specific rules of how they relate to each other…it’s hard to keep track, and then as they understand the system of rules, they adapt to it and edit what they choose and the point is always to push against what the rules are and figure out new ways to work within the structure, ultimately not to get used to anything and comfortable. The moments when we think, “Oh we’re getting stronger,” that means we’ll jump higher or add combat boots.

JH: My piece is called Freedom. I have a few personal narratives about knowing or being associated with really big events in U.S. history over the last ten years that have painted really big, monster narratives of people. Growing up, my best friend was the guy who shot and killed everybody at Columbine and this is a thing that happened in my life and it was weird and really rocked me and probably formed certain sensitivities in the way I look at the world. I also had an intense first hand experience of 9/11 and this is all really blown out exploitative narrative shit, but it stuck to my ribs in a way and I haven’t explicitly made work about it, but have this almost aggressively defensive thing about the media and/or propaganda creating narratives of people that are completely demonizing and uncurious and un-interrogative about why and who they really are. This extends to things like sexuality and ethnicity and all these sorts of other identity components that people make sweeping judgments about or create that are inaccurate or may be one-sided. So I’m making a piece called Freedom about new rights about construction of identity, and being understood or misunderstood. I think I feel personally inspired because of the way my friend Eric growing up was totally written off and misunderstood, and I got re-ignited when Osama bin Laden was killed this passed year and the way that sparked this collective national identity. So I am seeking to queer subvert these narratives of people.

Can you describe what is means to queer subvert?

JH: Everyone believes that Osama bin Laden was just this soulless fucking brown freak living somewhere in the Middle East that wreaked havoc on our motherfucking home turf soil. That’s the dominant narrative right? That he’s a demon, he’s a monster, he’s totally unspeakable and should die like a dog. But to subvert or queer that narrative is to suggest there is a person there who people engage in relationships with. He has breath, he has tears, he has genitals, orgasms, he has family, weak points, pleasure, vacation, he has favorite foods right? It’s not a new trope to suggest that very famous people have real sides to them; for me there’s something to debunk the idea that there is an innate evil in anyone. I think there’s a larger political project in my consciousness, but right now it’s really personal and so I’m figuring out how to create these extremely grotesque and over the top physical images that go further and further beyond what we can imagine to initially disgust us and ostracize the audience, and then actually go even further to promote curiosity and tenderness around the narrative that was previously like “fuck no that’s just disgusting and terrible.”…The overall umbrella theme is to really question and be suggestive about what our freedom actually is in terms of being understood and identities. Our freedom is a myth that’s just outside of the body. It’s not an actual embodied reality.

What do you do outside the rehearsal studio that feeds your work?

LA: There is a strong group of peers that Jesse and I run with and we do lots of things. I organize lots of little informal workshops that aren’t like regular workshops where you pay money and stuff. Keith and I were doing some Occupy SF/Occupy Oakland performance interventions. Jesse is doing the This Is What I Want project, which is part of the Queer Arts Festival and has been very successful. Lots of salons, weird little things like that that aren’t formal, you wouldn’t put an ad in the paper for, but are about like minded people coming together and constantly sharing ideas and information.

JH: I do film projects (and I’ve never talked about this in my dance performance community) but I do film projects with this director who works in San Francisco and Berlin and they’re new genre projects that are narratives. It’s this new genre called Mumblecore and its not documentary, but it’s moving footage in real time about sexuality and its basically trying to break open this idea that real non-simulated sex only happens in pornography. So I work with him and it satiates my continued theoretical interests in sexuality and it’s all horizontal with the dance and performance work.

Also I’m a waiter and its really been on my mind lately especially with the Occupy stuff really vilifying [social] class and making me question what my identity is. Being in Europe last summer I met people who live on a distinctly European system of social welfare we don’t have here, so here being working-class and working a service job becomes a central conflict in the work I make. Class identity is interesting. I’ve been thinking about my role as a citizen in the service world and that continues to be something I pull from.

Then This is What I Want is a mini festival I’ve curated a couple of years and it’s dance and performance work that asks the artist to stage the question “What do you want? Sexually what do you want?”

How do you find yourselves watching performance? What’s exciting or intriguing to you at the moment?

LA: Ivo Dimchev. I highly recommend his YouTube channel. We were at ImPulseTanz this summer and we were like these little American chipmunks already excited, and there are an array of people we ogled at. A lot of the pieces will be at American Realness.
For us acknowledging the performance is important, with the performer as larger-than-life. Active performance is something that activates.

JH: That’s why we don’t do so well in the dance world.

LA: A lot of times in dance it’s about this internal experience made public and I’m actually interested in the external.

JH: Thinking about performativity, there’s a pretty explicit obsession we both have; this idea that you’re performing and in front of people so what the fuck are you really doing? What are you doing there? Conscious of? Pretending to be conscious or not conscious of? And obviously there is a major body politics in the world – how are you presenting? So we’re always conscious of the dynamic “I see you, but I don’t see you, but I see you…” – we both do a lot with that. Theoretical performativity is something we’re always playing with. I wouldn’t say I’ve landed anywhere in particular, but being conscious of the audience affects the visual landscape and aesthetic.

LA: We have an acceptance of the performative state. I think in dance there’s often this facade where it’s about the internalized experience to be expressed.

JH: Because we’re criticizing assumptions in performance it’s painful for me to see work where the performance pretends like I’m not there or not seeing it. I know it’s a way of working but in general it’s not where I’m at. I know you can do these really deep investigations of technique and form and all these really amazing mechanics within that formalist work, but being that my aesthetics are what they are, it’s not going be what my work looks like.

Originally published in the December 2011 issue of In Dance.

With technology accelerating change in cultural participation, arts professionals packed the Marines Memorial Theater October 24 for a beacon to navigate the shifting landscape. “A revolution is happening across the arts sector as the walls between professional and amateur, audience and artist, curator and spectator start to crumble.” wrote Kary Schulman of Grants for the Arts (GFTA) and Tere Romo of the San Francisco Foundation (TSFF) introducing the day-long Beyond Dyanamic Adaptability conference. The conference concluded activities of a four-year funding partnership of TSFF and GFTA supported by the Wallace Foundation to “encourage systemic and sustainable structural change in the relationships of Bay Area arts organizations to their audiences.”

As a speaker on what Flynn Center Artistic Director John Killacky declared his “dream panel” about “The Changing Nature of Cultural Participation” Josephine Ramirez of The James Irvine Foundation discussed the occurring shift, from a sit-back-and-be-told culture utilizing broadcasted one-way communication, to a making and doing culture requiring conversational two-way communication. This change exists at the heart of Getting in on the Act, Understanding Participatory Arts Practice, a new study commissioned by The James Irvine Foundation, conducted by WolfBrown. The consumption model is going away and the study mines “How can arts institutions adapt to this new environment? Is participatory practice contradictory to, or complementary to, a business model that relies on professional production and consumption? How can arts organizations enter this new territory without compromising their values or artistic ideals?” Ramirez revealed how the nature and extent of the audience involvement can be seen along a spectrum, stretching from receptive at one end to participatory at the other – from audience as spectator to audience as artist.

Change Management
Also on the panel, Ben Cameron highlighted the paradigm shift from engagement to cultural participation. He noted how arts participation is exploding while audiences are diminishing, specifically with pro-am activity. Cameron challenged attendees, “Must we have a professional artist to intermediate a creative spiritual experience?” Dante Di Loreto, Glee Executive Producer, indicates that the professional artist is not a must, pointing to the “Gleek” video creating community as a model of participation. “Every single teenager’s bedroom is now a television studio.” notes Di Loreto.

Technology allowed a massive redistribution of knowledge with newspapers becoming multimedia companies, and with the multiplication of content creation from both traditional media as well as participating citizens. Cameron’s advice to the field: change management. He calls for arts organizations to put resources toward incremental change in order to innovate, and to deeply consider how they examine their institution’s practices. As a dramaturg, Cameron was taught to analyze, question and respond quickly and specifically, so he invites arts leaders to put on the institutional dramaturg hat in order to rethink current practices.

Design Thinking
Responding quickly is also a trademark of Executive Director Nina Simon’s leadership at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. “How can we change the timescales for implementation?” she asks. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History employs a suggestion board with Post-It notes. Ideas gleaned through the ongoing open call from visitors are then implemented in as little as 72 hours. Simon attributes the ability to be nimble in order to pilot something new immediately to have a large role in revitalizing the institution. Then decisions are made to either keep the program, tweak it or ditch it based on evaluation of impact. This process of identifying problems, piloting and user-testing reflects human-centered “design-thinking” made popular by IDEO’s Tim Brown.
“The explicit placing of the audience in the center is the shift we are seeing.” Simon said. She confidently states that serving the audience is her top priority, even before her allegiance to the artists.

During a later “Lightning Presentation” Beth Kanter, author of The Networked Nonprofit said “Get past your blind spot and listen. Have an open call. What is the expectation of the people formerly known as the audience?” Her presentation showcased “backseat tweets” as an example of giving people a voice, as well as Moms Rising, a group that doesn’t begin by broadcasting their own messages, but rather calls out to members for input. (It is worth noting that a recent panel at The Foundation Center, The Bold Italic’s Jennifer Maerz similarly discussed using public pitches to get expertise and ideas from outside the organization. They work regularly with IDEO to implement design thinking at their media company, successfully mixing online content with offline live events and engagement.) Asking better questions, really listening and actually implementing ideas from the audience ensures greater value and relevance in programs. Design, social media and user engagement strategy weave together the unique social architecture of the institution.

Failure
Experiments big and small come with failure, also part of incremental innovation, making crucial a good relationship with failure. Sean San Jose of Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo understands. He comments how at Intersection for the Arts, engagement is the job, so the creators utilize an open process to make dialogue the intention from the start of planning. “Its all a failure because you’re trying to engage the whole world in real issues.” said San Jose at an afternoon fishbowl discussion titled “How can we invite audiences to become active collaborators?” For him, failure serves as a point of reference to go for more.

Power and the Participatory Ghetto
Regarding the difference between collaborating and participating with audiences, Simon asks where in the institution’s process collaboration is useful and how the audience can become a co-creator. It’s about giving power to the folks who aren’t necessarily the trained experts and offering a clarity and cohesion in the message to collaborate. San Jose maintains that people want to be seen and heard. He asks how professionals can make the gap thinner and thinner between who is performing and spectating. Sabrina Merlo from Maker Faire discussed how her event is truly built around getting audiences to change behavior. As an open source program, the DIY festival allows anyone to create their own Maker Faire by giving over the power, so people can take the idea and leverage it. “Makers aren’t coming at it with the egos the artists do.” said Merlo about giving power to the audience.

“How can we create an opportunity where its about a visitor inviting someone else?” asks Simon, whose museum built an advice booth in which anyone could become the advice giver or seeker. She challenges arts workers to be comfortable separating the distribution of power from those with expertise. Simon also noted how in science museums, the assumption about the scientist is that no one understands what the scientist did and the museum has to translate their work through exhibition content and design. However in museums working with artists, the assumption that no one should understand the artist is frowned upon and therefore a different attitude about how to build the engagement.

Finally with the discussion of power comes the participatory ghetto. If you are asking the audience to participate, particularly in the case of the museum, “Get it on the real wall.” asserted Simon. For the audience to be a collaborator, visibility and street cred matter and become the currency of value.

Synthesizing many of these ideas, a meaty centerpiece of the conference was WolfBrown’s new report, Making Sense of Audience Engagement presented by Alan Brown and Rebecca Ratzkin, which defines engagement as “A unifying philosophy bringing together marketing, education and artistic programming in common service of maximizing the impact on audience.”  Through designing the before, during and after of the performance experience with interpretive assistance and curatorial insight, the presentation communicated that an institutions goal before the performance is to get people to a high level of anticipation, and after, to help audiences remember and memorialize experiences. Some of the discussed strategies included live introductions from stage, interactive interpretive activities, real-time interpretive assistance via digital devices, lightly facilitated post-performance discussions for processing and meaning making, scaling audience feedback and nurturing the citizen critic. The study also asks how one’s institution programs engagement for “the big middle” – the majority of audiences who want a little more than program notes. Re-imagining engagement for this major group will determine the success and relevance of the work.

Originally published in the December 2011 issue of In Dance.

Photo by Mark Francis

“Women my age are disappearing. My Facebook friends are no longer my friends, their toddlers are my friends.”

This sulk comes courtesy of a Kristina Wong character: a single, child-free woman in her late 20s, the titular Cat Lady in Wong’s show (performed last weekend at ODC Theater). With a glint in her eye, Wong tells the story of adopting Oliver the cat from a cat lady, who emerged from her cat lady-ness by getting married and having children. Wong, in a red blouse dress, kneepads, and white sneakers, maintains that as a solo theater artist her plays are her children, and she is doing important work ending suicide, depression, and racism with theater, the subject matter of these shows.

With a direct and devious style, Wong immediately has the audience in stitches during an opening monologue, in which she rocks a baby doll and fantasizes about the string connecting her to her soul mate that gets shorter and shorter until they are so close. She’s not the only lonely one. Feline costar Oliver, played by the grand Miss Barbie-Q in a black crushed velvet jumpsuit, also aches for affection, having been abandoned by his previous owner. Sequences of Wong chasing a laser pointer light, along with theater improvisation games and dance interludes, keep the talk of loneliness light and surreal, with a fugue here and a quartet of dancing elastic waistband pants there.

While on tour Wong meets a couple of Pick Up Artists (PUAs), played by Jabez Zuniga and Clayton Farris, loyal to Johnny Wolf’s PUA community. (For those not previously familiar with PUA Johnny Wolf, Cat Lady is a brazen introduction to his terminology where women are “targets”, and to other cringe-worthy manipulative behavior straight out of Neil Strauss’s The Game.) Wong unexpectedly reveals that she knows the PUA strategies, learned from watching Johnny Wolf videos to pass her time on tour. When she chimes in with the two PUAs hitting on her, Barbie-Q directs a committed and hilarious boot camp practice of pick up line delivery.

The funny indeed becomes strange. After the audience samples footage from an actual Johnny Wolf PUA workshop, Wong applies Wolf’s PUA tips for manipulating a female target to manipulating an audience in the theater. The parallel delivery gives the audience a taste of the psychological creepiness, which Wolf peddles.

While everyone in the play works hard to rationalize life choices and combat loneliness, no one gets an easy pass, including Wong’s friends who defend that their children are their creative project. Cat Lady unapologetically pokes. Even Johnny Wolf, with all of his women, confesses his own feelings of emptiness. In a closing scene, Wong reads his shocking letter of retirement as a PUA.

For more on Kristina Wong, check out Guardian writer Nicole Gluckstern’s take on her show Going Green the Wong Way here.

Originally published November 10, 2011 on the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Pixel Vision blog.

Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu

When Theatre Flamenco, Hawaiian dance company Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu, and Beach Blanket Babylon descend on City Hall October 7 for a festive installment of the Rotunda Dance Series, they’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the City’s Grants for the Arts (GFTA), a program of the Hotel Tax Fund, which uses tourism tax dollars to support arts organizations that attract visitors to San Francisco. “We really consider ourselves an economic investment in the City’s ability to attract visitors and put the widest variety of cultural activities in front of them when we get them here, and we expect a return on that investment. We get an extraordinary return in the form of so many different kinds of activities reaching so many people, and it shows in San Francisco’s national and worldwide reputation,” says GFTA Director Kary Schulman. The Rotunda Dance Series in particular showcases the region’s rich diversity and creativity through free public performances presented by Dancers’ Group and World Arts West, in partnership with San Francisco Grants for the Arts and San Francisco City Hall.

50 Years of San Francisco Arts and Tourism
When asked about the program’s long history, which pre-dates the National Endowment for the Arts, Schulman adds, “We just show up everyday and do what we do.” She has been showing up for 30 years leading GFTA and after the confetti of the 50th anniversary settles, she and the GFTA staff continue their mission. “Any changes at GFTA are slow, organic and integral. We have more organizations now than we used to, we have refined our funding strategy as a progressive relationship to the organizations budget. It’s been a matter of refinement of the mission but continuing that mission to be an ongoing dependable source of long-term funding.”

“People think of us as being an arts funder primarily, and while that is our activity, that’s not really the mission of this agency,” says Khan Wong, Senior Program Manager who is guiding the October 7 festivities. With the tagline, “Promoting the city by supporting the arts,” GFTA’s main mission, boosting tourism, is driven when the groups they fund leverage grant support to employ people and inject dollars into the local economy. Tourism is San Francisco’s number one industry. The celebration on October 7 will convey the richness of what GFTA has done over the years and share the culture that has been enhanced with the space and resources to thrive. The noontime performance on October 7 in the City Hall Rotunda will be followed by a public reception.

Crunching the numbers of the 2010-11 fiscal year, general operating support grants totaling $9,348,129 were distributed to 217 organizations in the areas of dance, civic activities, literary arts, media, multi-arts, parades, theater and visual arts from GTFA. That general operating support was leveraged by grantees to support 6,112 jobs and economic activity totaling $453,887,437. GFTA resists moving in new directions because feedback from the constituency reflects the value of ongoing general operating support that is consistent, stable and dependable. By providing operating support, GFTA aims to make it possible for the widest variety of arts organizations to flourish, which attracts visitors to the city. San Francisco consistently ranks among the top three cities for cultural tourists (meaning that arts and culture were the primary reasons for destination choice), and those who live here know that San Francisco boasts a much richer arts scene than other larger cities. With a population similar to Indianapolis, the per capita amount of cultural activity in San Francisco far surpasses other places in the U.S.

“We provide this incredible banquet of activity and then its up to the visitor to choose. Many visitors don’t go to any arts activities at all, particularly the first time visitor who might go to Golden Gate Park, ride cable cars and go to Alcatraz. Then the next time they come back they need to do something else…so we make it attractive for people to keep returning to San Francisco because there’s always something going on,” explains Schulman.

The Ethnic Dance Festival, the largest event of its kind in North America, was actually created by Grants for the Arts. During the 70’s certain cultural dance companies embedded in San Francisco communities did not give many public performances or have 501c3s, so GFTA sought to support these talented groups that were not a part of the regular granting process. The city had acquired several cultural centers—the Mission Cultural Center, the Chinese Cultural Center and the center now called the African American Art and Culture Complex. Beginning in 1978, these served as venues for the events. The festival eventually shifted to proscenium spaces because most cultural centers weren’t equipped for large scale, professionally produced activity. In 1982, following an RFP process, the contract to produce the festival was awarded to World Arts West, then known as City Celebration, so the festival would no longer be produced out of a government office.

Changing Times, An Enduring Mission
“In 1961 we got more of the collection [of the hotel tax], but with the hotel tax over the years, more and more city entities have gotten a slice of the pie,” says Schulman, adding “With the economic downturn, the general fund has been more needy and the city’s other needs have taken precedent.” Even so, while many cities have a hotel tax, its unusual for the tax to support the arts, and among those funds that do go to the arts, general operating support is very rare. While there hasn’t been a change in GFTA’s mission, Wong notes, “One thing that’s changed related to the budget is that back when we had more money we’d be able to take a gamble on new emergent companies and that’s less true now. It’s difficult because we’ve seen some really strong up-and-coming groups.”

Renee Hayes, GFTA Associate Director, stresses the importance of maintaining the agency’s core mission and being as transparent as possible to keep the field informed of resources available, especially in times of diminished budgets. Her advice to arts organizations: “Seek diverse sources of income to make sure you have a good ratio of earned and contributed revenue, cultivate individual donors as well as city funding, and perhaps foundation funding. The more diverse the income streams are the healthier the organization is bound to be.”

“Resist mission drift, resist the temptation to change your programming and do something that’s not really integral to the mission of your organization solely for the purpose of attracting a grant. Being really grounded and aware of what the mission is and sticking to it, is really important,” adds Wong. Schulman also encourages arts organizations to take advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies to get the word out and support one’s activities.

Additionally, the leadership at Grants for the Arts notes how the boundaries have become permeable between the nonprofit arts and commercial arts. “San Francisco is a real mecca for people doing new and different kinds of arts forms and not adopting the 501c3 model. That’s something I’d like us to think about more in the future, how we can support those kinds of activities. Young people coming along are not saying ‘Oh, I want to create a 501c3 nonprofit…’” Schulman notes. GFTA works with some fiscally sponsored groups, but acknowledges there is no perfect fiscal sponsor model that really serves the sponsored organization and allows the sponsor to be accountable for the organization.

Connecting with the Community
“Every year we have two public meetings with the arts community,” Hayes says. “I’ve been here fourteen years and never cease to be amazed at the continuing passion and creativity of the people in San Francisco arts.” Schulman agrees that the meeting is a service that gets a lot of people in the same room talking not only to GFTA and the advisory committee, but really talking to one another. She notes how matches and collaborations have emerged from the gathering and how after a couple of years weathering the economic downturn, the arts community is pulling out of the doldrums. “The most recent meeting was so enlivening. It was as if people said, ‘Ok this is the new normal, but we’re not defeated, we’re moving forward.’” And GFTA shares that forward motion, promoting the city by supporting the arts. Onward.

Celebrating the City’s Grants for the Arts 50th anniversary, a free performance in the City Hall Rotunda featuring Theatre Flamenco, Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu, and cast members of Beach Blanket Babylon will be held at noon on Friday, October 7, followed by a public reception in the North Light Court.

Originally published in the October 2011 issue of In Dance.

Yoko Higashino, Offsite Dance Project Photo by Yuta Hinohara

Just up the coast, the contemporary art binge that is Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s (PICA) ninth Time Based Art Festival (TBA) bubbled with fluidity and openness as the resounding spirit. From September 8-18 that fluidity and openness occurred between contemporary art practices, between the city and the art, between performers and audience members, between onstage and offstage. Not only addressing current global issues, the festival embraced the increasingly porous walls between art disciplines and outside fields, collapsing the container for presenting art experiences.

Under the direction of Cathy Edwards (also the Director of Performance Programs at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas and formerly of Dance Theater Workshop and Movement Research), TBA employs a nomadic citywide platform requiring attendees to explore nooks and crannies with eleven main venues spread throughout the four quadrants of Portland. PICA headquarters the festival at the closed Washington High School called “The Works,” a hub for the round-the-clock possibilities including morning workshops with the TBA artists, noontime salons, afternoon happenings, evening performances and late night activity with a beer garden for gathering, digesting and discussing. The clear nights, lush nature, industrial pockets, culinary delights and bike-friendliness that accompany the festival indeed dovetail with the tastes of many San Francisco residents, and help make TBA a ten-day utopia for art lovers.

“The TBA Festival future-forecasts important aesthetic developments,” writes Edwards in the program, and the performances do, in fact, ripple out, with a handful of the TBA artists appearing recently and upcoming in San Francisco. On the opening day of the festival, Shantala Shivalingappa performed solos by her mentors Ushio Amagatsu (of Sankai Juku) and Pina Bausch. Catch her in San Francisco with a Kuchipudi program at the Herbst Theater November 1, presented by San Francisco Performances.

Also coming to town this season, the Portland-based company tEEth appears at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Left Coast Leaning Festival, December 1-3. Directed by choreographer Angelle Herbert and composer Phillip Kraft, tEEth performed Home Made at TBA, an intimate work with live-feed video, haunting vocals, and plenty of nudity. In the push-pull between hostility and tenderness, hostility dominated the stage for the majority of the work, demonstrating missed connections and relationship struggle with silent and amplified screams, as well as quick-morphing theatrical expressions.

Kyle Abraham, who appeared in San Francisco during the 2011 Black Choreographers Festival with his work-in-process Live! The Realest MC, brought a further developed version of that solo, as well as his full-length work The Radio Show to the festival with his company Abraham.In.Motion. His technique, illuminated during a TBA Institute class, unfolded as a fast-moving mashup of postmodern movement, incorporating influences from New York teacher Kevin Wynn, Merce Cunningham and, naturally, the swift and luscious language of Abraham’s own body.

Taylor Mac, having recently completed his San Francisco run of the epic The Lily’s Revenge, performed his first cabaret at the festival, Comparison is Violence or Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook. Highlighting the human tendencies to bring an agenda to the theater and resist audience participation, Mac interrupted himself for a dramatic song here, a David Bowie story there, and, in the end, had the audience on their feet for a mime routine dancing in imaginary bubblegum bubbles.

These are just a handful of the performances that occurred during the ten days in Portland. Augmented by the evening’s natural fade from light to darkness, the Offsite Dance Project, in three parts by Japanese choreographers, immersed witnesses in the playful with Mika Arashiki and Mari Fukutome, the complex with Yukio Suzuki and the disorienting with Yoko Higashino. A train actually ran through the site-specific work, featuring the dance of the city. The program used sites in Southeast Portland’s industrial district for fresh remix of the surroundings.

Austin’s Rude Mechs performed The Method Gun, a theater work based on A Streetcar Named Desire, and gave a talk at the TBA Institute discussing the consensus necessary to create devised work with their group of thirty artists. Additionally, Malina Rodriguez’s Dance Truck – a mobile project that uses the back of a rental truck as a stage – made an appearance from Atlanta. Participatory games by artist Michel Groisman stirred the crowds at Washington High several afternoons. Andrew Dinwiddle’s Get Mad at Sin revisited a 1971 Alabama sermon by Pentecostal preacher Jimmy Swaggart performed in a tent at dusk. Add to that a 24-hour monologue by Mike Daisey, an installation and performance by Seattle-based Zoe|Juniper, and visit from French choreographer Rachid Ouramdance L’A, and you get a sense of the possibilities at TBA.

This year marked a leadership transition for the festival as Cathy Edwards ends her three-year tenure as guest artistic director, passing the torch to San Francisco export and former Yerba Buena Center for the Arts performing arts curator, Angela Mattox. Mattox will remain in Portland year-round (unlike previous directors) expanding PICA’s arts programming. While the dates for next year’s TBA are, well, TBA, San Francisco art lovers should plan a jaunt up the coast next September – just a quick flight or ride-share away.

Originally published September 20, 2011 on San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Pixel Vision blog.

Photo by Gia Goodrich Courtesy Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.

Augmented by the evening’s natural fade from light to darkness, the Offsite Dance Project, in three parts, immerses witnesses in the playful with Mika Arashiki and Mari Fukutome, the complex with Yukio Suzuki and the disorienting with Yoko Higashino. Part of PICA’s Time-Based Art festival on Wednesday, the dance program by Japanese choreographers employs sites in Southeast Portland’s industrial district for fresh remix of the surroundings.

The Olympic Mills Commerce Center plays host to Ho Ho-Do, during which Arashiki and Fukutome make their childlike presence known peering through the rooftop windows, flashing peace signs and extending legs into view. Then, emerging from an elevator to enter a clearing in the same crowded room as the audience, the playful duo enacts games of peek-a-boo and leapfrog to bubblegum beats. Obstructed views are part of the experience, but add to the surprise of the paper airplane flurry that the dancers launch lightheartedly overhead. They naturally direct the group outside to the next site with an exhilarating run into the early evening light.

Under the Morrison Bridge, the urban soundscape of traffic becomes amplified as Butoh-influenced Suzuki advances in cool street clothes beneath the overpass, wriggling through textured bound movements with a sunken chest and thrust pelvis. He walks with his back turned and flashing red lights frame his wiry body as a train chugs past for several minutes, eliciting the thrill of the unpredictable surroundings. During the climactic train passing at sunset, Suzuki crumples to the ground lying still, thus highlighting the dance of the city.

With nightfall, comes disorientation. The industrial building upon which Baby-Q’s Higashino paces initially appears like an outdoor proscenium stage with the action on an elevated platform. In a sophisticated red mini-dress, Higashino responds to Yohei Saito’s haunting black and white projections, which dwarf her, to dark electronic music by Wayne Horvitz. The immersive projected images ranging from scribbled sketches, backward clocks, static and startling angular bolts give way to dripping orange and red color at a gripping moment where Higashino, frontal, follows a dramatic strip of light forward off the platform and onto the pavement below. Her vulnerable slithering on the street ends with her lying still on her side. When the shapely projections lift, the nightmare strangely dissipates.

Originally published September 19, 2011 on the Willamette Week blog.